Virtual Machine Escape

What Does Virtual Machine Escape Mean?

Virtual machine escape is a security exploit that enables a hacker/cracker to gain access to the primary hypervisor and its created virtual machines. Virtual machine escape enables a user to escape from the guest OS boundary created and managed by the hypervisor and gain access to the top tier virtualization layer.

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Techopedia Explains Virtual Machine Escape

Virtual machine escape is one of the security threats or exploits within a virtual machine or virtualization infrastructure. Typically, after escaping the guest virtual machine, the exploiter can execute code on the hypervisor or the host operating system. It will also have access to the primary hypervisor and can perform any administrative tasks such as virtual machine creation, deletion, resource quota modification and more. Moreover, the attacker can edit the privileges assigned to its specific virtual machine.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…